All of the aforementioned burdens are lightened considerably by using AWS’ cloud-native offerings. Instead of building, securing, and scaling your own MQTT broker, you simply leverage the AWS IoT Core endpoints within each region. Traffic can be steered to the best endpoint by pointing to DNS records in Amazon Route 53 with routing by geolocation enabled.
Fleet Provisioning can be used for certificate distribution and device admission. You could easily add new components to the architecture because AWS IoT Core integrates seamlessly with other AWS services such as Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, and more. Features of AWS IoT Core such as Device Shadow would be quite complex to implement yourself.
Finally, dashboards can be built quickly without needing to worry about the infrastructure layer using the Amazon Managed Grafana service. MFA can be delegated to Amazon Cognito for users who log in to the dashboard.
Hopefully, this illustrates that building on EC2 offers more control and can be advantageous in one way; cloud-native services provide significant advantages of their own. These are the same reasons that, in the end, people build applications on the cloud in the first place – which can be summarized as allowing businesses to focus on innovation and less on the underlying nuts and bolts of infrastructure.
Staying ahead of emerging AWS services and trends
Staying ahead of emerging AWS services and trends is crucial for leveraging the full potential of cloud computing. As AWS continuously innovates and evolves, keeping up can be challenging, but it is essential if you want to be ready for the technological breakthroughs expected of Industry 4.0.
Continuous learning
AWS offers a comprehensive certification program. More importantly, their training program is top-notch. In addition to traditional classroom-based courses, there is a great deal of self-paced training available in AWS Skill Builder:
Figure 14.2 – Free training course on AWS Outposts Servers on AWS Skill Builder
Regularly participating in these courses not only keeps you updated on new services and best practices but also deepens your understanding of the AWS ecosystem.
Another type of content available on AWS Skill Builder is hands-on labs that use AWS Workshop Studio to provision you a temporary AWS account to follow along with them:
Figure 14.3 – Hands-on lab available in AWS Skill Builder
Note that these labs aren’t available with the free tier of the AWS Skill Builder account. A subscription is required. At the time of writing, these subscriptions are $29 a month and grant unlimited access to all of the labs and more advanced training courses in AWS Skill Builder.